The Research Paper, and Why We Should Still Care Doug Brent …people.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent/art/The Research Paper and... · 2011-03-22 · The Research Paper, and Why We Should Still

The Research Paper, and Why We Should Still Care

Doug Brent

University of Calgary

1414 Hunterbrook Road NW

Calgary AB T2K 4V5

Canada

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The Research Paper, and Why We Should Still Care – Brent 1

In this article, I revisit an orphaned child of writing studies—the ―research paper.‖ Discussions

of the research paper and how we might teach it remain spotty at best in the writing studies

literature. There is still little agreement on the exact boundaries of the genre, or even if indeed it

is a genre. There is also little discussion of or agreement on why the university as a whole and

most particularly the English department should bother to teach it, especially to undergraduates.

Despite uncertainty about its identity and mission, the research paper or something like it

by other names (the ―library paper,‖ the ―source paper,‖ or perhaps least informatively, the ―term

paper‖) remains as a staple of writing instruction. Manning traces the genre back at least to the

1920‘s, and reported in 1961 that 83% of colleges and universities across the US required a

paper explicitly based on the use of the library. In 1982, Ford and Perry found the situation little

changed, reporting that the research paper was offered in 84.09% of freshman composition

programs and 40.03% of advanced composition programs. In 2009, Melzer surveyed more

widely across all disciplines, not just within composition, and although he did not break out an

exact percentage for the research paper as such (he was more interested in broader categories

based on Britton‘s), he nonetheless found that the research paper in one form or another

remained the dominant genre in his sample.

In this article, I review and rethink the literature on the research paper. I do so, not in an

attempt to be comprehensive, but in order to map out the main threads of argument in this

contested domain, focussing especially on arguments about what the form is and why we might

or might not want to teach it. I do not offer new insights on how best to teach the research paper,

although I review briefly the insights of some who have suggested answers to that important

question. Rather, I concentrate on issues of definition and teleology that are prior to the question

of instruction, and try to locate the genre‘s place in the mission of the university and of writing

studies. In the course of doing so, I argue that the genre is real, if blurry and often badly defined,

and also useful, if in contested ways. To do so, I draw on a set of theories that have been

immensely productive in the recent history of writing studies, but which have not been brought

to bear to any extent on the research paper: rhetorical genre studies, situated learning and activity

theory.

I should preface this discussion with the caveat that I am speaking mainly for the role of

the research paper in the research university. I believe that many of my arguments also apply,

possibly with qualifications, to any institution of higher learning, and even, with many more

The Research Paper 2

qualifications, to secondary education. However, it is especially important to get our relationship

to the research paper on a sound footing in the research university because of the pre-eminence

of research in its mandate. I therefore ask the indulgence of faculty at liberal arts colleges, two-

year colleges and technical institutes if I seem at times to be talking past them.

What is a “Research Paper”?

Despite its apparent ubiquity, we remain uncertain as to what exactly the ―research paper‖ is and

what it is intended to do for students. Manning‘s 1961 survey allowed institutions who no longer

emphasised the research paper to tick off a reason why they did not. He found that ―35%

answered that it did not serve the purpose for which it was intended—a rather vague phrase but

perhaps necessarily so, for there is general disagreement about the purpose of the freshman

paper‖ (77). The reason Manning gives for the vagueness of the phrase is far more interesting

than the percentage of institutions ticking off this response, for it sets a tone for disagreement

about the nature of this entity that persists to this day.

In 1982, Richard Larson articulated the most-cited criticism of the concept of the ―research

paper‖ as a useful label. Larson argues that

The "research paper" has no conceptual or procedural identity. Research, while it can

inform almost any type of writing, is itself the subject—the substance—of no distinctly

identifiable kind of writing. . . . There is nothing of substance or content that differentiates

one paper that draws on data from outside the author's own self from another such paper.

(813)

Similarly, the research paper has no formal identity: "I cannot imagine any identifiable design

that any scholar in rhetoric has identified as a recurrent plan for arranging discourse which

cannot incorporate the fruits of research, broadly construed" (814). In fact, if the definition of

"research" is extended to include searching for information in any place outside the writer's own

self, then almost any writing is research writing. To represent research as a purely a matter of

going to the library, taking notes, and writing them up, Larson argues, is to misrepresent the

complex ways in which researchers acquire data.

Larson is simply arguing (without the genre language that was unavailable to him at the

time) that the term ―research paper,‖ if taken literally, denotes a wide variety of genres, not all of

which are captured by the common-sense notion of the ―research paper‖ in current-traditional

first-year composition (go to the library, look up three sources on capital punishment, and come


back with a paper). ―Research‖ can mean both secondary and primary research—research that

sends us to the library as well as research that asks us to look at the world—and it can refer both

to formal research conducted according to conventions borrowed from science, and to informal

research that consists of observation and experience.

Thus Larson draws attention to the fact that the term ―research paper‖ is a clumsy way to

describe what we generally mean by it. What people generally mean when they say ―research

paper‖ in a pedagogical context is a paper that depends largely or exclusively on secondary

sources arranged and integrated into the author‘s text according to a varied but relatively stable

set of conventions. These conventions are not merely formal—where to place the quotation

marks and how to arrange a reference list—but also structural and procedural—how to use the

ideas of others to construct an argument of one‘s own. The paper you are reading now is, by this

definition, a research paper.

If the ―research paper‖ is not a very useful—perhaps even dangerously misleading—

label, then why do we persist in using it and its synonyms? Do we do so merely from current-

traditional habit?

Habit is likely a large part of it, but I submit that there are substantive reasons as well. As

Carolyn Miller (1984) and her many successors in the tradition of rhetorical genre studies tell us,

a genre is a set of repeated actions in response to what is perceived as a repeated rhetorical

exigence. If we as a community of readers and writers perceive that a particular set of

circumstances repeatedly requires a particular kind of rhetorical action in response, that response

can be called a genre. The boundaries of the genre may be blurry, since no two people will pick

out the same collection of exigencies and call them ―the same,‖ but where there is loose

agreement, there is a genre.

By this definition, then the research paper as commonly understood is a genre because

the rhetorical exigence of basing an argument on others‘ texts presents special problems that are

not presented by, say, an expressive paper, or one that relies chiefly on primary empirical data

such as a lab report. The repeated rhetorical actions that are required by a research paper of this

type—finding and focussing a topic, locating and evaluating sources, finding a point to argue

based on those sources, writing an argument that incorporates those sources without turning into

a book report—all present students with serious problems quite different from the problems

presented by other forms. Near the end of this paper, I will review some of these problems in


greater detail and review some of the ways that scholars have proposed helping students learn to

solve them. Here, I wish only to point out that these problems are indices of a unique rhetorical

exigence, and therefore, by extension, of a genre. The term persists in common usage because it

describes something that is different from a wide range of other somethings that students

encounter.

A large part of our problem, then, might be solved by finding a better term for this genre,

one that highlights its own set of rhetorical actions without spilling over into other research

activities in the ways that Larson rightly objects to. In the late 1980s and 1990s, a cluster of

researchers associated with the Center for the Study of Writing at UC Berkeley and Carnegie-

Mellon published a string of technical reports, journal articles and book chapters that represents

the first significant, sustained outpouring of interest in the research paper. These researchers,

who include Nelson, Hayes, Flower, Kantz, Ackerman, Berenkotter, and many other familiar

names, seldom if ever use the term ―research paper‖ to describe the object of their interest.

Instead, they use terms such as ―reading to write‖ and ―writing from sources.‖1

This cluster of labels does two things. First, it denotes more exactly what most people

mean when they use the term ―research paper‖—a paper that uses secondary sources in a more or

less formal way. It still leaves some boundaries fuzzy—for instance, a critical exegesis of a

single source, a simple summary, or an experiential paper augmented by some literary references

could come under the umbrella of ―writing from sources‖ without being what most people mean

by ―research paper,‖ or even what the Berkeley/Carnegie-Mellon group means by ―writing from

sources.‖ But the term is far clearer conceptually than ―research paper.‖

More important, it changes the focus from what the product is to what the writer does. In

doing so, it generates new research questions. Less often do we ask what such a paper looks like,

or should look like. Rather, we ask what demands it makes of the writer. What do students or

expert writers do when they need to find sources? What circumstances propel them to do so?

How do they select and interpret the sources they find? How do they construct a more or less

original argument informed by those sources? More subtly, how to they avoid being

overwhelmed by sources, producing either their own argument with a few sources tacked on or a

literature review with their own lame conclusion tacked on? In short, what activities are involved

in producing a source-based paper? In this discussion, therefore, I will use the term ―writing

from sources‖ by choice, but since the term ―research paper‖ is widely used by many of the


authors I cite, I will slip between the two as context dictates and treat them as functionally

synonymous (even though I have just argued that, on a more meaningful level, they aren‘t).

Why Teach Writing from Sources?

Before we spend time answering those very good questions, we should back up one more step

and ask why we should teach students to write this genre in the first place, despite a number of

cogent arguments why we should not do so, or at least not in the composition class. First, we can

separate what we (ie., academics) think is accomplished by teaching students to write from

sources, and what many of our students think. In the same issue of College English that featured

Larson‘s eloquent plea for a retirement of the term, Schwegler and Shamoon published one of

the first attempts to get a grip on what the research paper actually does for students—or is

thought to do. By interviewing students and instructors, Schwegler and Shamoon discovered

something that is not surprising in retrospect but which had not been previously articulated: that

there is a huge disconnect between what students think of the research paper and what their

instructors think:

Students generally view the research paper as informative in aim, not argumentative,

much less analytical; as factual rather than interpretive; designed to show off knowledge

of library skills and documentation procedures. The paper is viewed as an exercise in

information gathering, not an act of discovery; the audience is assumed to be a professor

who already knows about the subject and is testing the student's knowledge and

information-gathering ability. Thus, according to the students, evaluation is (and should

be) based on the quantity and quality of the information presented, on correctness of

documentation, but not on form and style (English papers excepted). (819)

Asked about their own research, instructors take a much broader view. They see the research

paper as a way to ―test a theory, to follow up on previous research, or to explore a problem posed

by other research or by events‖ (819). They see the research paper as analytical and interpretive,

in pursuit of an elusive truth but tolerant of uncertainty, and most importantly open-ended,

contributing to an ongoing conversation. When asked about the purpose of expecting students to

write research papers, the instructors interviewed by Schwegler and Shamoon are virtually

unanimous: the aim of the research paper is ―to get students to think in the same critical,

analytical, inquiring mode as instructors do—like a literary critic, a sociologist, an art historian,

or a chemist‖ (821).


I will come back later to the problem of how students view the purpose of the research

paper. Here, the important aspect of Schwegler and Shamoon`s interviews is that they show how

academics typically think of writing from sources as a means of introducing undergraduates not

only to discipline-specific ways of writing but also to discipline-specific ways of thinking. The

view parallels that which Bartholomae both articulates and critically interrogates in his

foundational and often-cited ―Inventing the University‖:

Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university

for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or

Anthropology or Economics or English. He has to learn to speak our language,

to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating,

reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. (403)

Here Bartholome anticipates Lave and Wenger‘s concept of ―legitimate peripheral participation‖

or ―situated learning,‖ in which apprentices internalize the operations of their trade by

participating meaningfully in those operations, beginning first on the margins but then more

centrally as they become more proficient and are given greater responsibility. Or, to choose a

metaphor more familiar to us in writing studies, Barthomolae sees the university as welcoming

students to the Burkean parlor and inviting them to put in their oar.

Importantly, Bartholomae includes ways of knowing along with ways of speaking,

acknowledging that the two are inseparable. Learning to write like a scholar is learning to think

like a scholar. Bartholomae‘s examples are of generalist writing from commonplaces rather than

of research-based writing as such, but his argument applies all the more strongly to the latter.

Writing from sources is what we do in university, and if attending university is to involve more

than simply banking information, students must become legitimate peripheral participants in the

discourse community of the university. Bartholomae acknowledges that this act of invention is

damnably difficult and at times next to impossible for most undergraduates, let alone beginning

basic writers, but he never suggests that we should not expect them to ―carry out the bluff‖ (403).

If we see writing from sources as one way of integrating students into a research-based

discourse community, the question arises: Are we, in teaching research processes and research-

oriented modes of thought to undergraduates, primarily preparing them to be graduate students,

and ultimately, academics like ourselves? This is a troubling question. Certainly those who do go

on to graduate school will appreciate having been eased into appropriate ways of thinking and


doing from their undergraduate years. However, even in major research universities, not all

students go on to graduate school. In some, the percentage is quite small. What is the role of

writing from sources, with the mindset that it implies, in the education of a student who may go

directly into a professional or other career?

There are many possible answers to this question, all drawn from variants on the

argument that teaching students to engage in dialogue with other voices, including academic and

discipline-specific voices, is simply one of the things that a liberal education is supposed to do.

However, we can put a more secure foundation under this commonplace by referring to the work

of William Perry. Perry`s research suggests that young people, particularly undergraduate

students, pass through distinct stages of intellectual and epistemological development. His full

scheme comprises nine stages, but for simplicity these can be grouped into three major

intellectual movements. For Perry, students tend to progress from absolute faith in authority

(dualism) through a refusal to believe that right or wrong answers exist at all (multiplicity), to a

realization that there can be good reasons for preferring one belief to another (commitment in

relativism). With this perspective comes "meta-thought," the capacity for comparing the

assumptions and processes of different ways of thinking, their own and those of others.

Perry‘s ideas have been extended, modified, and extensively re-evaluated for decades.

Certainly any stage model is best handled cautiously lest it become reductive. However, his basic

insight that young people (and very possibly adults) go through numerous crises of

epistemological stance, and that many of their attitudes and responses can be traced to such

stances, persists as a powerful explanatory tool. If dualism is characterised by an excessive

reliance on authority and an inability to examine ideas critically, it is not hard to see why

beginning students have trouble weaving their own argument out of their sources. The problem

is not a lack of practice in note-taking, and certainly not (in most cases) deliberate dishonesty. It

is simply that the epistemological stance of a dualist is not equal to the most difficult task there

is: pick a warrantable thesis from the competing voices offered and defend it with good

reasons.The student in a state of multiplicity will have different but equally intractable

difficulties. If all opinions are more or less equal, how to choose among the competing

perspectives that even the most cursory research will offer up, other than deciding by majority

rule, or going with the authorities that most support one‘s preconceived opinions?

In addition to explaining our students‘ difficulties, a concept of epistemological


development can help with the current question of what a liberal education can do for a student

aside from preparing him or her for a life of academia. For Perry, progress in epistemological

stance results from exposure to the vast chaos of experience that marks a liberal education. Not

only competing ideas presented in class, but also exposure to new ideas and new ways of

thinking from classmates, the pressure to deal with competing life choices, career plans, and

personal values, all contribute to the disequilibrium that propels growth. Many of these forces are

beyond our control as educators. Perry‘s lesson for educators is nonetheless clear:

Many institutions of higher learning have succeeded, sometimes through careful

planning, sometimes through the sheer accident of their internal diversity, in providing

for students‘ growth beyond dualistic thought into the discovery of disciplined contextual

relativism. Many would hope to encourage in their students the values of Commitment,

and to provide in their faculties the requisite models. To meet this promise, we must all

learn how to validate for our students a dialectical mode of thought, which at first seems

―irrational,‖ and then to assist them in honoring its limits. To do this, we need to teach

dialectically—that is, to introduce our students, as our greatest teachers have introduced

us, not only to the orderly certainties of our subject, but to its unresolved dilemmas. (109)

In all its complexity and messiness, writing from sources can expose students to

―unresolved dilemmas‖ and to the difficulties of grappling with them for the benefit of an

audience. An invitation to the Burkean parlor is an invitation to think in the complex, critical

way that Perry understands as a chief goal of a liberal education—as Bruce Ballinger puts it in

Beyond Note Cards, ―to experience the ‗revolution in identity‘ that that Perry believes is a mark

of intellectual growth‖ (74). Certainly this is not an argument for continuing to teach the current-

traditional ―research paper,‖ arguably a grotesque caricature of expert research, but it is certainly

an argument for finding good ways to introduce students to the process of getting in touch with

the conversation of scholars and learning gradually to speak their language.

Why Teach Writing from Sources in English Composition?

If we accept that engaging students with sources is a worthy educational activity, we still need to

ask why a major portion, or indeed any portion, of this task should fall to us in the field of

writing studies.

One argument is that teaching the research paper is an important and necessary service to

the disciplines. Ballenger traces the origins of this attitude to the gradual replacement of the


classical ideal of public discourse, which finds its materials chiefly in commonplace ideas not

necessarily attributable to particular authorities, with the empirical ideal of German scholarship.

In the early part of the twentieth century, American universities increasingly emphasised the

specialized disciplines in which knowledge was built stone by stone, using the work of those

who have gone before but moving this work forward through empirical investigation

disseminated to an increasingly esoteric audience of like-minded specialists.

Ballenger finds this tradition handed on to teachers in the English department through the

powerful influence of a long line of ever more reductive textbooks. The earliest significant

example is Baldwin‘s 1906 A College Manual of Rhetoric, in which Baldwin states:

This idea naturally leads to the library. . . . How to find facts, how to compare inferences,

and finally how to bring reading to bear,—in all this, freshman composition may be of

practical service to any other course, and of liberal service to the student himself. (qtd in

Ballenger 31)

Here, Baldwin alludes both to a form of the ―liberal arts‖ or intellectual development argument

that I have discussed above, and the more practical service argument.

Ballenger traces the development of the research paper from this relatively balanced

starting point through texts that increasingly divorce the genre from other forms of writing.

Where Baldwin saw the research paper as a subset of exposition, later texts gave it a place all to

itself, increasingly divorced from other forms and from a general audience, and increasingly

described exclusively in terms of its adherence to conventions. Ballinger points out that many of

these textbooks defend the teaching of the research paper at least partly in terms of its ability to

strengthen the student‘s powers of investigation. Despite these nods to the argument from

intellectual development, however, with each passing decade that argument becomes

increasingly submerged under the argument that the teaching of the research paper is primarily a

service to other disciplines.

When writers in English studies discuss the research paper at all, few take up this service

argument directly, although one can suspect that it is very much in the minds of administrators

and curriculum planners who persist in retaining the research paper as a staple of composition

courses. Likely we don‘t like to talk about this argument very much, except to decry it from time

to time, because we have spent so many years suffering under the stigma of being mere

handmaids to other disciplines. However, one might ask what‘s wrong with providing a service,


not just to other disciplines, but to the students who must function in those disciplines? If the

entire research focus of our profession is to understand what writing is, how people learn to

write, and how best to facilitate this learning, is there any shame in using this knowledge to teach

a form that is useful in other contexts? After all, Aristotle considered rhetoric a supreme art

precisely because it encompasses the business of all the other arts, to say nothing of the practical

business of life. Moreover, when the service argument is looked at closely, it reveals itself to be

essentially the intellectual engagement argument in disguise. If writing from sources moves

beyond the current-traditional model to become a means of introducing academic processes and

academic culture, it must necessarily serve the disciplines in which that academic culture finds

its various forms. In fact, if teaching writing from sources is seen in this more complex way, the

―service‖ argument is really just a less palatable way of restating the argument that we are

introducing students to the academic discourse community. And it is only less palatable if seen

as a means of teaching supposedly ―basic‖ writing skills to other disciplines or of relieving other

disciplines of any responsibility for taking some ownership of students‘ reading and writing

processes.

The service argument runs into a more serious problem if we ask whether it is even

possible to teach writing from sources effectively outside the other disciplines in which it is used.

The authors represented in Joseph Petraglia‘s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking

Writing Instruction (1995)—often called (not necessarily unkindly) the ―New Abolitionists‖—

make a convincing case against the ability of composition courses to teach much of anything that

is transferrable to other contexts, including ways of writing from sources. More recently, Dias,

Freedman, Medway and Paré use activity theory to argue perhaps the strongest and most cogent

case for the difficulty of transferring skills and knowledge between activity systems, as reflected

in the title of their book, Worlds Apart. Dias et al. are particularly interested in the very large gap

between school and workplace activity systems, but their scepticism about transfer applies

equally to the gap between the disciplines and the composition class.

This argument against transfer is a strong one, and it has spawned a legion of WAC/WID

programs that place responsibility for writing from sources, and all disciplinary writing, back

with the disciplines where it arguably belongs. Such programs go a long way toward resisting the

ghettoization of writing as exclusively the English department‘s problem. But one of the key

arguments for WAC/WID, the argument that little or nothing we do in our classes is likely to


influence what students are able to do in others, may be exaggerated.

The study of learning transfer has a long and complex history that is often overlooked by

those who study it from the writing studies perspective. Many of the arguments against the

notion of easy transfer of skills from composition classes to others point out that such transfer

presupposes that skills are neat modular units that can be moved around and reapplied in new

contexts at will (see for instance Smart and Brown). But this view is a caricature of transfer

theory that the subfield of transfer studies—rooted in but not bound to cognitive psychology—

has itself moved beyond. As I have discussed in much more detail elsewhere (-----, forthcoming),

many of the more recent and more productive studies of learning transfer reject this simplistic

notion in favour of much more complex relationships between one field of activity and another.

For instance, Hatano and Greeno argue that, rather than looking for simple transfer, we should be

looking at the ―productivity‖ of the old skills, that is, their ability to facilitate new learning in the

new situation. Similarly, Hager and Hodkinson use the term ―reconstruction‖ to describe how, on

entering a new situation, people call on analogous knowledge and skills to help them relearn how

to deal with more or less novel tasks.

These more complex notions of transfer are also seen in some of the more recent writing

studies literature that calls on activity theory. Smart and Brown study a group of professional

writing students on an internship. They are impressed with the speed with which many of these

students pick up on the very different tasks imposed by this new activity system. To Smart and

Brown, they seem to be, not transferring skills learned in another environment, but transforming

those skills by using them as a bridge to new learning. Significantly, one of the concepts that

appears to be the most helpful in mastering this new environment is general rhetorical

awareness—that is, the ability to read a new situation and recognize the rhetorical moves that are

called for.

In short, transfer of knowledge and skills is complex, elusive and hard to measure, and

sometimes does not happen at all. But sometimes it does, or at least it does to the extent that

students can bring habits of mind (what Bereiter calls ―dispositions‖) learned in one environment

to bear on learning to function in a new one. The argument from transfer, then provides no

compelling reason why composition classes cannot teach students to write from sources in order

to help them to reinvent their skills more easily in new contexts.

But this is simply an argument from a lack of clear negatives. Are there positive reasons


why we should continue to shoulder at least part of this responsibility, and perhaps a larger part

than is borne by any one class in any other discipline?

I am tempted to fall back on the fact that, partly as an accident of the history in which the

task of teaching writing has been given primarily to English, we frankly know more about it, and

care more about it, than most instructors in most disciplines. Of course, many teachers of

composition have been press-ganged into this service with little or no background or training.

But on the whole, the chances of finding someone who knows and cares about teaching writing

is much higher if you search in classes of English composition than if you search in any other

field.

This argument from expertise, though comforting to those of us who have spent our lives

acquiring and contributing to that knowledge, is not only a bit self-serving, but also does not in

itself explain why English should continue to be a center of activity in this area in this era of

WAC and WID. In fact, I have argued elsewhere (----- 2005, 2006) that the first year seminar is,

in institutions that have instituted them, a much better place to introduce students to research

culture. The first year seminar, when it is focussed on academic content rather than on general

orientation to the university, provides a venue in which instructors in any field can build a course

around a topic that relates to their own research but is broad enough to allow students to find

their own area of interest within it. Because it is not part of a hierarchy of courses designed to

introduce students step by step to the essential knowledge of a field, the instructor is not

constrained by what I call the ―anxiety of coverage‖—the obligation to cover a certain amount of

content so that instructors of later courses in the hierarchy can assume it as a starting point for

later, more advanced courses in the discipline. This anxiety typically inhibits the professor of a

mainstream course, despite good intentions absorbed at WID faculty development sessions, from

dedicating much time to walking students through the rhetorical moves of writing from sources,

soliciting and commenting on draft after draft, and in general talking about process as well as

content.

In contrast, the instructor of a first year seminar on, say, the role of transportation in the

development of nineteenth century North America, does not need to fret that her students may

not come away with as much knowledge of the history of transportation as they might have

absorbed in a lecture course. She can concern herself with whether students have come away

with an enlarged understanding of how to find out about transportation history, including how to


find sources, how to read them and compare them, and how to base an argument on them. She

can also, if she wishes, build the whole course around one escalating series of interlocking

assignments rather than trying to assign a range of different topics to ensure coverage. Any

resulting knowledge of transportation history itself may be regarded as gravy.2

In institutions that do not have first year seminars, or not enough of them to go around,

and even in ones that do, the English composition class can be the next best thing. Although we

all justly bristle at the idea that composition has ―no content to cover,‖ it is nonetheless the case

that most composition courses outside majors in rhetoric or professional writing do not carry as

much expectation that certain defined content will be covered. If students come away from our

courses with increased rhetorical knowledge and skills, we will have done our job. Some

composition courses, admittedly, are governed by English departments deeply mired in current-

traditional teaching who still insist on instruction in the traditional modes and/or the writing of

belle-lettristic essays. These caveats aside, the composition course offers an opportunity rarely

seen in other disciplines to devote time to teaching students the complex processes of writing

from sources rather than simply expecting them to do it.

Of course, we are still not obligated to shoulder the entire burden ourselves. There are

still good arguments for replacing first year composition with a robust combination of WID, first

year seminars, and other models that break the hegemony of the English department. I have

made many of these arguments myself. But until WID nirvana dawns, the composition course,

whose central concern is to make explicit the mechanisms of the textual construction of

knowledge, must still have at least some role in teaching students to read and write from sources.

How Do Students Learn to Write from Sources?

I have argued that writing from sources, aka the ―research paper,‖ does have a conceptual

identity, that there are good arguments for teaching it, and that there are good arguments for

classes in composition to have a role (though not an exclusive one) in doing so. This, of course,

brings us to the hard part: how do we go about doing so? If we can‘t, at least provisionally,

answer the question of how we can teach writing from sources effectively, all the preceding

arguments that we should do so are beside the point.

Even though attention to writing from sources is still spotty, we have come a long way

from 1981, when Ford et al. summed up the state of scholarship in teaching students to write

from sources thus:


There are exceedingly few articles of a theoretical nature or that are based on research,

and almost none cites even one other work on the subject. They are not cumulative.

Rather, the majority are of the short, often repetitive, show-and-tell variety characteristic

of an immature field. ("Selected Bibliography" 51).

Despite continued light attention to the subject relative to other topics in writing studies, the

intervening thirty years have nonetheless yielded so much to say about how to teach writing from

sources—and even more about how not to—that another entire article could be devoted to

reviewing and evaluating this literature. Let me close, then, with only a summary of a few

important approaches to this problem to show that it is not intractable and that the entire

foregoing discussion is not therefore moot.

One fruit of the renewed and deepened interest in writing from sources is an approach

that brings the process closer to territory presumed to be the natural business of the English

classroom—that is, variants of expressive forms that enable students to come to grips with their

own experience. Macrorie and the I-search paper can be seen as the founder of this school of

thought, but in ―eyond Note Cards: Rethinking the Freshman Research Paper, Ballenger moves

away from Macrorie‘s almost exclusive emphasis on describing the journey of discovery itself.

Reaching back to the insights of Spellmeyer and Moffet, and even further back to Montaigne‘s

essayistic revolt against Scholastic style (the ―research paper‖ of the early Renaissance),

Ballenger reinvents the research paper as the ―research essay.‖ The research essay starts with the

self, and explicitly encourages students to use personal, subjective response as part of the process

of answering a question that is important to them. But students are also expected to follow their

topic into the library and if necessary onto the streets in the form of limited empirical data

collection. The result, Ballenger argues, is a form in which objectivity and subjectivity engage in

a delicate dance that Ballenger claims is actually closer in spirit to the process of ―real‖ research

in academic disciplines than is the current-traditional research paper, even if the product doesn‘t

look much like what one might find in most journals. The composition course thereby avoids

attempting to teach forms borrowed from other disciplines, instead teaching students to engage in

dialogic, research based inquiry in a form more natural to the discipline of English studies.

Students who are paralyzed, and bored, by the crushing emphasis on objectivity associated with

the current-traditional research paper come alive when they realize that they can use the texts of

others in concert with their own subjective experience, and they learn to use the library as a


resource in their own inquiry rather than as an inert citation mine.

A strategy that tackles the same problem from the other direction is the recent ―Writing

about Writing‖ movement. Writers in this vein do not posit that the natural business of the

writing class is the personal essay and that its main goal is the use of writing for self-discovery

and self-expression. Rather, they begin with the assumption that students in any discipline should

explore the knowledge that is most natural to researchers in that discipline—the sorts of

questions they ask, the forms of knowledge that they value, and the techniques of investigation

they employ. Wardle (2007; 2009) and Dawes and Wardle (2007) argue that as teachers of

writing and researchers in the discipline of writing studies, we can use our knowledge of our own

discipline as a source of strength and make it the explicit center of our courses. They suggest that

students should use literature in writing studies as sources from which to write and to launch

from that literature into relatively simple empirical projects based on rhetorical analysis and field

studies of writers in action (including themselves). This curriculum, they argue, avoids the

problem of artificial genres found only in composition courses by substituting genres that are

actually used in a living field of study. In learning to write in the genres of writing studies, they

also learn the theory of genre itself, and become more meta-aware of their own writing practices

and those of others.

Early results from Wardle‘s and Downs and Wardle‘s studies of transfer suggest that

some of the particular writing strategies taught in their WAW courses (planning, revision, etc.)

do not transfer very well to other courses, simply because the writing assigned in such courses is

not, in students‘ first two years of university, sufficiently challenging or engaging to make

students feel required to use those strategies. They do find, however, that students can bring their

heightened meta-awareness of genres, rhetorical situations and rhetorical reading strategies to

bear on new writing situations. Perhaps most important, many of them learned that research

means engaging in an ongoing conversation. One student wrote:

I never before realized that every written text is part of an ongoing conversation with

those who have discussed the topic before and those who will read your writing in the

future and write their own texts in response to yours. I did not connect reading and

writing so strongly in the past. (Downs and Wardle, 569)

The same student could see for herself the lesson what generations of composition teachers have

futilely told their students: that writing from sources means creating an argument, not just


pasting in material. Even more important, she could see for herself how writers accomplished

this rhetorical move:

I do not now think that lit reviews are merely paraphrasing things other people have said.

In fact, [they are] a place to frame the whole argument in your research paper. Without

the lit review to explain what has been said before you, what you have to say doesn't

matter to anybody. It also helps to focus your main ideas within your conclusion, by

pointing out major ideas and connecting them with each other. Lit reviews basically

create the framework for what you're going to do, and how what you're doing will fit into

the discourse community. (Downs and Wardle, 569)

WAW courses, therefore, have the potential to lay down some vital concepts about writing from

sources and research in general, concepts which it will be the job of courses in other disciplines

to help students apply forms of writing appropriate to those disciplines. WAW, then, offers FYC

a place alongside WID in developing students‘ genre-specific writing ability.

These two approaches (WAW and reconceiving the research paper as the research essay)

are attempts to deal with the question of how to teach writing from sources at the macro level.

We also need a more micro-level understanding of students‘ problems in mastering the genre,

and of how to help them work through these problems. Our colleagues, the academic librarians

who often must help our students navigate the tasks which we have assigned them, can offer

important insights on what students actually do when they seek the sources that we ask them to

write from. While much of the bibliographic instruction literature concentrates on the narrow

problem of how to help students locate and evaluate references, other variants locate this

referencing problem in terms of how students approach the entire activity of writing from

sources.3

In ―Desperately Seeking Citations: Uncovering Faculty Assumptions about the Research

Process,‖ Leckie sends a particularly strong message to instructors both in writing studies and

across all disciplines. Leckie distinguishes between the strategies of expert researchers, who use

a finely-tuned information seeking strategy, and those of students, who often fall back on a

coping strategy that many of us are familiar with: heading for the library at the last minute,

desperately seizing the first sources available that bear on their topic, and mining them for

nuggets that support a thesis conceived in advance. She argues that a significant cause is poor

assignment design and a lack of support from the course instructor.


Leckie singles out assignments that require students to become familiar with a wide

variety of important and unfamiliar concepts at once. She describes a student in a second-year

course in resource management who turns up in the library bearing the following assignment:

Choose one of the following topics:

Biodiversity;

Ocean pollution;

Transportation of hazardous wastes;

Desertification; or

The Tropical rainforest.

In your paper, discuss:

The nature of the issue;

Its natural/biophysical aspects

What has been done on the issue since 1980

What is being done on the issue currently (203)

The problem here is not just the immensely broad nature of the topics. The problem is that the

task requires students to perform a great variety of tasks in succession: read around in the general

area of biodiversity to get a general feel for the subject, then start reading in some of the more

expert journal literature, reject any studies that deal in minute detail with questions of interest to

specialists but which are not useful to someone not immersed in the debate to which they

contribute, and watch for names that come up repeatedly—a likely sign of a seminal author. To

do well on such a task, the student would also need to follow citation trails to map out the web of

ideas that connect to these studies (rather than starting every search afresh back at a subject

index, as most students do), and then sift the studies found so that ―what has been done on the

issue since 1980‖ could be narrowed from potentially hundreds of studies to a few important

examples. And all of this would be preliminary to deciding on specific thesis. Yet these

requirements are all implicit. There is nothing in the assignment itself to alert students that all of

these tasks are required in order to do a good job, let alone guidance on how to do them.

Leckie does not assume that a student would know how to do all of this even if told—

pace Schwegler and Shamoon, who optimistically state that ―the features of the academic

research paper are easy enough to identify and convey to undergraduates‖ (821). Rather, Leckie

suggests a radical reformation of the assignment to permit what she calls a ―stratified


methodology,‖ in which the assignment is broken up into sequential components that ask

students to focus on learning only one new task at a time. Of course, some of these steps still

contain an immense number of subtasks—one step, for instance, is ―finding and using scholarly

literature,‖ which alone could be the subject of many courses. But at least instructors could guide

students through more manageable chunks of the process rather than simply turning them loose

in the library.

As mentioned earlier, another key cluster of literature on writing from sources is that

which was developed under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Writing at UC Berkeley

and Carnegie-Mellon. Some of the most useful of this literature echoes the bibliographic

instruction literature in its emphasis on the critical importance of the assignment and its pacing.

Nelson and Hayes‘ seminal study ―How the Writing Context Shapes College Writers‘ Strategies

for Writing from Sources‖ (1988) gives a particularly clear message for curriculum design. (This

study is the first of a series of studies by Jennie Nelson, all of which merit attention. See Nelson,

1990, 1992, 1993, and1994.)

Nelson and Hayes study a number of both novice and advanced students writing from

sources. They note two very different sets of strategies: low-investment strategies involving the

familiar pattern of waiting until the last minute and then quickly finding a few sources that

contain ―easily plundered pockets of information‖ (5), and high investment strategies involving

broader information-seeking followed by writing a paper that constructs a complex argument

around an issue. They also call these strategies ―content driven‖ vs. ―issue-driven‖ strategies, and

link them to Bereiter and Scardemalia‘s related work on information-telling vs. information-

transforming strategies (17-18). Although novice writers in the sample used low-investment

strategies more often than the more experienced writers, the writer‘s level of experience only

partly predicted which set of strategies she or he would choose. In fact, one senior student

reported being able to choose between the easier and the more difficult and time-consuming (but

more interesting) strategies based on the importance of the assignment. For instance, she would

be more likely to choose high-investment strategies for an assignment in a course that was part of

her major as opposed to one in an option course.

What seemed most strongly to predict the strategies chosen was the structure of the

course itself. Students given a topic and left to fend for themselves were more likely to choose

low-investment strategies. They were more likely to use high-investment strategies when


instructors used a form of the ―stratified methodology‖ that Leckie calls for: breaking the task

into portions and providing feedback on each portion. Requiring drafts, response statements, log

entries and other forms of reporting increased students‘ sense that the assignment was a dialogue

rather than a simple task of evaluation. Audience also mattered: students who had to present their

results orally to the class were much more likely to use high-investment strategies. (Compare

Reither, 1985, who recommends turning an entire class into a discourse community in which

reading and writing occur in the context of an ongoing exploration of a subject that involves the

whole class.)

Not surprisingly, then, students‘ willingness to invest in an assignment is proportional to

the instructor‘s willingness to make a similar investment. This may not be good news to

instructors who already feel overburdened by enormous class sizes and immense pressures to

cover an ever-expanding body of material. However, as noted earlier, it does place the onus on

those of us privileged to teach composition in relatively manageable classes to press this

advantage by creating an atmosphere in which research is part of a long-term, ongoing dialogic

inquiry into a body of knowledge rather than a boring hit-and-run exercise in the library.

Conclusion

In this article I have argued that students should be engaged in writing from sources, of entering

the academic discourse community; that it is our job as composition teachers to take a particular

interest in teaching them to do so (although certainly not on our own); and that the literature on

the subject, both from writing studies and from bibliographic instruction, offers us a number of

avenues to explore in order to develop curricular approaches to doing so. Clearly, much more

needs to be done, but the literature already available reveals that more has already been done

than we might realize.

Disturbingly, most of the literature cited in this article is between twenty and thirty years

old. This should not be taken to mean that nothing has been thought or said about writing from

sources in the interim (see for instance Wardle); only that the late 1980‘s and early 1990‘s were

marked by a new recognition both of the importance of writing from sources and of the lack of

serious attention it had hitherto received, combined with a new suite of research tools adapted

from cognitive science that allowed for a much more fine-grained look at how students go about

reading and writing in the context of research-based assignments. Since that early outpouring of

research, work on writing from sources has been somewhat more hit-or-miss.


We now have in our possession a newer set of tools in the form of rhetorical genre

theory, activity theory and situated learning. These tools, which I have referred to in places

throughout this article, have been used extensively to discuss writing in the disciplines and the

transition from school to workplace writing. However, there is much more to be done in

understanding students‘ experience of writing from sources from these new perspectives, and

even more in understanding how to design pedagogical approaches that reflect this

understanding. But first, we must be prepared to take the matter of writing from sources

seriously and to consider it a fit subject of both research and practice in the field of writing

studies. It is in this spirit that I have argued for renewed attention to the frequently ignored or

maligned genre of the ―research paper.‖


Notes

1. Relatively few of these studies have been published in journals. Anyone interested in

the extant research on writing from sources would be well advised to look at the string of

technical reports published by the Center for the Study of Writing. These may be found at

http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/techreports.csp. Another set of studies is

collected in Linda Flower et al., Reading to Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process.

(As an aside, I dearly wish I had had access to this material when I wrote -----------, formally

published in 1992 but effectively completed by 1989.)

2. Of course, students who have been raised on a banking model don‘t always get this. In answer

to an evaluation question, ―Did you learn a lot in this course?‖ I frequently get the response, ―I

didn‘t learn anything in this course because he didn‘t teach me anything.‖ One student even

made my day by adding, ―In fact, the only things I learned were the things I found out for

myself.‖

3. Those of us who would teach writing from sources would do well both to familiarize ourselves

with these insights on the contact zone between the student and the library, and to take steps to

involve our colleagues in the library not only with the execution but also with the planning of our

courses to make sure that we are supporting each other rather than duplicating or even subverting

each other‘s efforts. In addition to the Leckie article referred to below, some classics of

bibliographic instruction literature of particular interest to writing studies include Fister,

―Teaching the Rhetorical Dimensions of Research‖ and ―The Research Processes of

Undergraduate Students,‖ and Rabinowitz, ―Working in a Vacuum: A Study of the Literature of

Student Research and Writing.‖ (Rabinowitz suggests gloomily that ―Despite striking similarities

in results, there has been little exchange of knowledge or effort at creating shared research

agendas between the two groups of researchers. Pedagogical literature about library research

written by classroom faculty reveals serious misconceptions about the role of librarians in the

student research process‖ (337).

Although it is oriented much more specifically to the ―reference,‖ that is, finding sources,

Keefer, ―The Hungry Rats Syndrome: Library Anxiety, Information Literacy, and the Academic

Reference Process‖ will reward reading for its insights into our students‘ troubled relationship

with the library.


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